Tag Archives: Waste

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump promised to revolutionize trade policy for the benefit of American workers and industry. He should begin by stopping the Export-Import Bank from purveying corporate welfare.

Ex-Im is a federal agency established to help American exporters by providing taxpayer-backed financing to governments and businesses in developing foreign markets without access to the necessary means to buy American products. In its youth, Ex-Im did just that and bolstered exports in the interwar period to Cuba, Haiti and Burma. Over the last 50 years, though, it has ventured far from its original purpose and has become a vehicle for ruinous market distortion.

According to the Mercatus Center, some of the largest beneficiaries of Ex-Im financing are companies like Boeing, Bechtel Power, General Electric and Caterpillar — all multinational conglomerates that could conceivably get financing directly from private lenders.

The costs of regulation are hard to see. With no dollars changing hands, their toll is measured in wasted time, prospective entrepreneurs who are dissuaded from doing business, and confused citizens whose days are ruined by misfiled paperwork.

This is a classic problem, famously laid out long ago by Frédéric Bastiat, in his essayWhat Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. These unseen costs accrue, making the business climate unfavorable to entrepreneurs and giving leeway for the government to arbitrarily administer regulated businesses.

The more difficult it is to navigate the bureaucracy and to apply to entitlement programs, the more time is wasted, especially for the vulnerable people who have little time to waste. The question is: what can be done?